Quentin Tarantino To Direct Episodes of ‘Justified’ Revival

Quentin Tarantino is first and foremost a movie guy, but he has made a couple of ventures into television through the years. At his first peak in Hollywood, he guest directed an episode of ER, which at the time was the biggest drama on TV. A decade later, he did a turn directing CSI: Crime Scene Investigation while it was amongst the most-watched series on television.

For the first time in more than 15 years, it looks like Tarantino is taking another dip into the TV world. According to Variety, he is in talks to direct “one or two episodes” on Justified: City Primeval, the upcoming revival of the cult FX cable series starring Timothy Olyphant as Marshal Raylan Givens.

There are a couple reasons the project might appeal to Tarantino. First and foremost, the show is based on the writing of Elmore Leonard, who remains the only author that Tarantino has ever adapted for one of his movies (Jackie Brown, which was based on Leonard’s book Rum Punch). Tarantino also worked with Olyphant on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The movie was partly set in the world TV production in the late 1960s; it could have easily given Tarantino the bug to get back into TV directing.

When FX announced the sequel show, they said it would be set eight years after the original Justified ended and follow Olyphant’s character as he’s living in Miami “and balancing his life as a Marshal and a father to a 14-year-old girl. A chance encounter on a desolate Florida highway sends him to Detroit. There he crosses paths with Clement Mansell, aka The Oklahoma Wildman, a violent, sociopathic desperado who's already slipped through the fingers of Detroit's finest once and aims to do so again.” The show is based on the 1980 Elmore Leonard novel City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit, which did not originally feature the Raylan Givens character.

More Justified on its own was exciting news. If Tarantino really does direct part of City Primeval, that immediately becomes one of my most anticipated shows of the next few years.